At the beginning of the year it looked as if Google was battening down the hatches and withdrawing from its previous flights of fancy – no more dirigible mounted servers or cotton-candy machines in the lavatories for them! Yet the release of new tools like the Wonder Wheel and Google Wave suggest the search giant isn’t ready to rest on its laurels. Now we have the Google Labs release of Google Squared, a promising search tool that needs some work but is likely to find its way into the main search options menu sooner rather than later.
It’s easy to see why Google decided to let people get their hands dirty with Squared this week. Microsoft’s new Bing is already getting attention for displaying results in ways that are more useful to many searchers. This is true in particular of searches that can result in people parting ways with their money such as for airline tickets or retail items.
As it is, Squared can’t really help you compare ticket prices yet, as you can see it can’t recognize the importance of destination in the comparison:
It can give you a pretty nifty list of film noir features. But can you spot the ringer?
Google is smart enough to know that Brute Force is a film noir title, it still doesn’t understand that the “Brute Force” pictured is a four-wheeler or that the description is from a non-relevant Wikipedia entry. What is smart though is that people can add their own columns. Google will even suggest relevant column headings. Often, they are spot on:
Even if you stray from their suggestions Google will try to pull in relevant info to fill your custom heading (in this case “price”):
You can also start from scratch and build columns based on relationships between things you’ve defined and Squared will try to tease these commonalities out and match them with it’s own findings.
Clearly, Squared is a work in progress, but Google’s interest in mixing up results to better provide information to users is evident. This tips their interest in incorporating the kind of onsite searching that typically takes place on Amazon and CNet and which Bing and Kosmix are already integrating.
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